Between 317 and 321 Licinius endured religious toleration of the Christians. Perhaps he was being kept in line by his wife or by the bishop of Nicomedia, who was based at his court. However, it was a role that the old ‘liberator’ of the east, the one-time saviour of the Christians, increasingly hated. He had drifted without belief into toleration of the Christians for short-term gain, and now it showed. In the west, by contrast, Constantine the Christian became increasingly strident. He liked to stay up late at night and compose his own rousing speeches. These he delivered to his courtiers, lay sermons expressing his divinely inspired vision for the empire. He put on quite a show. Whenever he mentioned the judgement of God, his face would tighten with intensity, he would lower his voice and point to heaven. His words caused some courtiers in his audience to bow their heads as if he were ‘actually flogging them with his argument’. Others clapped loudly, but could not really match the emperor’s fervour. Ultimately they ignored his Christian lecturing.38
Alongside communicating the awe of God, however, the emperor could still be repressive, even violent. In 317 the Donatist dispute in Africa had not yet been resolved. Constantine lost patience and tried to end it by authorizing exiles and executions. Within a few years, some pagan temples were closed down – the first sign in the west of the slow eradication of the pluralist melting pot of pagan cults. In their place was evidence of a growing new common identity.
Through endowments of property, the high profile of bishops, and charitable gifts of clothes and grain to the poor, orphans, destitute widows and divorcees, churches were fast becoming the centres of local power and organization throughout the provinces of the western empire.39 Around 321 the judicial authority of bishops was extended, and bequests to churches legalized. It was easy for the provincial élites to buy into the new religion. Upper classes across the empire were becoming increasingly wealthy and self-confident; archaeological finds reveal how the mark of Christ, the chi-rho, began appearing on objects belonging to the wealthy at this time and how new, exquisite villas were rising up across the western empire.40 Religious conversion had its advantages: it brought with it the new majesty of empire, a new patriotism, and the belief that these would continue to flourish so long as Constantine received not the old Roman ‘peace of the gods’, but divine protection from God.
In a rare preserved speech known as the ‘Oration to the Saints’, delivered to a Christian audience on a Good Friday between 321 and 324, Constantine made his position clear. God was responsible for his success. That success put him under a great obligation: to persuade his subjects to worship God, to reform the wicked and unbelieving, and to liberate the persecuted. It was a religious position that had huge political consequences. The stance forced Licinius into a corner, slowly but surely turning the screw on him. It was not long before he handed Constantine a gift, the very thing that the western emperor had perhaps been looking for all along, the very thing that neatly coincided with his faith – a justification for resuming the war.
In Nicomedia the emperor of the east was becoming increasingly suspicious, paranoid even. Were those officials within his own court, he wondered, agents of Constantine? Were they Christian spies? He took them aside and had them interrogated, but could find no evidence of guilt. For one man, so the story goes, he devised a test of loyalty. He asked Auxentius, a legal clerk in his administration, to accompany him to a courtyard in his palace where there was a fountain, a statue of Dionysus and a flourishing vine. Licinius ordered Auxentius to cut the fullest cluster of grapes he could find. When he had done so, the emperor asked him to dedicate the fruit to Dionysus. Auxentius refused. Licinius gave him an ultimatum: lay the grapes at the foot of the statue or leave his court for ever. Auxentius chose the latter; he would later become bishop of Mopsuestia, in modern-day Turkey.41 This episode was the first of many tests imposed by Licinius. Fear would drive him to far more extreme measures.
In 323 Licinius compelled everyone in his administration to sacrifice or else lose their job. He put the same test of conformity to his army. On the advice of zealous pagan officials, the requirement was forced on civilians, and on 24 December of that year Constantine learnt that bishops were compelled to sacrifice at the festival marking Licinius’s fifteen years as emperor. Anyone who refused was to be punished. Councils and assemblies of bishops were forbidden; Licinius did not want them to organize, unite and encircle him, so he forced them to remain in their own cities. Christian meetings of worship could take place only in the open air, and all tax exemptions for the Christian clergy were scrapped. The influence of his devout wife, and his love for her, perhaps prevented him from going further. Other people in his administration had no such compunction. In short, Licinius encouraged a new permissiveness to reign in the east, a sharp whiplash of pagan reaction. Roman governors were free to punish dissident Christians, shut down some churches, demolish others and, in the case of the bishops in the province of Bithynia-Pontus south of the Black Sea, murder key figureheads in the Christian clergy. According to Eusebius, their bodies were chopped up and thrown into the sea as food for fish.42
At the imperial palace in Serdica Constantine was urged by Lactantius, his adviser and tutor to his son, to rescue ‘the just in other parts of the world’. When Constantine, perhaps deliberately, invaded Licinius’s territories in Thrace on the pretext of repelling a Gothic invasion, both parties seized the opportunity to wage war. Constantine’s case for hostilities against his brother-in-law and former ally was more wide-ranging than the diplomatic incident suggested. This was a war for the defence of the oppressed, a war of liberation, a war against a persecutor.43
The stage was set for one of the last epic confrontations in Roman history. Both sides were quick to mobilize their forces, an extraordinary military feat in its own right. Each side was said to number more than 100,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. Even given the propensity of ancient sources to exaggerate, significant numbers of troops had clearly been amassed. Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carians, Greeks from Asia Minor, Bithynians and Africans filled out the ranks of Licinius’s forces, while Constantine, in control of a larger part of the Roman empire, relied less on auxiliaries than on standing units of regular Roman legionaries. Eusebius, in contrasting the two armies, had a literary field day. Constantine’s troops were, of course, Christian soldiers of God. Licinius’s, on the other hand, were motley followers of the traditional gods and eastern mystery cults: wizards, diviners, druggists, seers and meddlers in the malignant arts of sorcery.44
Some time before the forces came face to face, Licinius asked his priests to read the omens. The augurers observed the flights of birds and inspected the arrangement of entrails for signs. Their verdict? The omens promised that Licinius would be victorious. The ceremonies continued when Licinius led his closest commanders to a thickly wooded, sacred grove. Pagan statues peeped through the boughs of trees and from behind mossy, rocky springs. The usual sacrifices were made, then Licinius addressed his men. His rhetorical flourish is typical of the way the pro-Christian sources liked to present the conflict.